To hear Peter Lister talk about nano filaments and elemental components, it’s hard to grasp that he is actually discussing something as commonplace as a two-by-four.

But the lowly two-by-four is undergoing a renaissance.

Lister, a vice-president of research at FPInnovations, is at the forefront of that renaissance. He’s one of 550 people at the wood-products research firm across Canada who are breaking new ground in how wood is used. It is Canada’s largest forestry laboratory.

From the mundane — better-designed resource roads with a reduced environmental footprint, or thinner saw blades that maintain their structural integrity while creating less sawdust waste — to exotic transformational technologies like stronger-than-steel carbon filaments extracted from tree cellulose, the future uses of a log are changing. Lister is head of research at the UBC centre, a bold, all-wood building where timbers made from engineered lumber soar 20 metres up in the interior, creating the impression of an old-growth forest.

The serenity created by the architectural use of wood disguises a high-tech research centre that is developing new technologies aimed at making this province’s forest sector the most advanced and most competitive in the world. One example: Behind the building, housed in a silo with walls of solid concrete that are more than two metres thick, is the country’s largest and most powerful CT scanner, capable of producing sharp 3D images of the inside of a log, opening up new worlds in our understanding of trees. It is so powerful that Japanese carmakers borrow time on the scanner to probe engine blocks for stress cracks. Even a minke whale has been scanned, resulting in the discovery of an unknown organ in the whale’s solid-bone nose.

The scanner’s function is to map the inside of logs typically harvested in B.C., building up a databank that can then be used to develop scanning software to be applied in B.C. sawmills. By being able to rapidly scan a log’s interior, optimizing software can then determine the best way to cut the log to extract the highest lumber value. If the grain twists down the length of a log, the scanning software can identify it and the log can be rotated as it is sawed. The board that comes out may be twisted, but can be straightened out later in drying.

“Wood is elastic. It is actually quite like plastic. Once it is dry, it is not any more. You can take the green lumber, you can put weight on it, dry it and it all comes out all straight,” Lister said during a tour of the research centre.

Because the boards have been cut to follow the twists of the grain revealed by the scanner, the final, dried product has perfectly straight grain down its entire length.

Using the power of X-ray scanners is the next evolutionary development in sawmilling technology, Lister said.

“X-ray scanning, we think, is going to be the future. We are doing a lot of research right now on X-ray scanning.

“It allows us to look inside the log, instead of just the shape. We can figure out where the knots are, where the rot is, figure out where the different features are inside that log that could reduce the value.”

In a lab specializing in sawblade design, the development of thinner blades, a small design tweak, has saved sawmills up to $1 million a year by chewing less wood into sawdust. But the faster the thin blades spin, the more they lose their structural integrity, turning into what Lister described as a wet dishrag, totally unable to function. FPInnovations found a solution — the blades have to be run at very exacting speeds and specific tensioning. Researchers don’t know the exact reasons behind the changes in the properties of a sawblade, Lister said, but they know it works.

In another of the workshop-like labs, Conrad Lum, a North American expert in the structural properties of wood, has applied heavy weights to suspended beams of cross-laminated timber to see how well it performs. Cross-laminated timber is made from layers of lumber that are laid cross-wise to each other and laminated together to make a product of any dimension desired, and has structural properties far stronger than its component pieces. Sheets of it are strong enough that they can be designed for use in elevator shafts for the wood-based highrise towers that are now on drawing boards, said Lum.

Then there are those fibrils, micro-strings that form the building blocks of one single fibre. They are actually stronger than the fibre. Fibrils in turn are being broken down in a process developed by FPInnovations into nanocrystalline cellulose, a product with many properties and forms that can be used for everything from biocomposites for bone replacements to new construction products and bioplastics.

“It’s a bold, new world. I think of us as going through a whole new Industrial Revolution,” Lister said of the changes taking place in the forestry sector. “We are going from materials that come from petroleum-based back to materials that come from plant-based, which is, of course, what we did before the petroleum revolution. It’s really interesting how we are looping back to where we came from.

“Over the next number of years we are going to see a huge change in where we get our basic materials from, and wood is extremely well-positioned for that. As a forestry nation and a forestry province, it’s a great story for us.”

The future uses of a log, whether its sugars can be refined into fuels to replace fossil fuels, the soup of chemicals created in pulping it can form the foundation for a new biochemical industry, all hinge on how healthy the forestry sector is as a whole, Lister said. From forest ecosystems to harvesting, sawmilling, pulp, paper, engineered wood, and energy, all steps along the way need to work together.

“In Canada, the different parts of the forest sector are very integrated. Sawmills pay for the logging; they bring the logs into the mill, they process the sawlogs into lumber. The byproducts from those sawlogs, the chips, go to pulp mills that then create paper and other products. At the end of the day, we really utilize all of the tree.

“If one piece of that integrated system isn’t healthy, for example if pulp mills aren’t healthy, then sawmills can’t operate because they don’t have a market for their chips. Keeping the whole system healthy is important. As the market for printed papers goes down, we need to find other market opportunities for the pulp and paper sector.

“This is something we are really excited about because we think bioproducts provide a huge opportunity for the sector.

“Where it all is going to end up, who knows. But I think our industry is going to be transformed from an industry focusing on lumber and pulp to an industry that’s going to be making a wide range of different types of products.

“We will make the products that have the highest value at that particularly time. We will be making chemical A today or product B tomorrow, and if the market goes down for one, we will turn to another one. It will make our industry much more robust and more diversified, and ultimately a lot healthier and more profitable.”

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The journey of a log — Day 6: Science rediscovers the oldest building product on the planet

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